[1] https://medium.com/kickstarter/kickstarter-is-a-pbc-heres-wh...
Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective, but industry wide unions are effectively a monopoly on labor supply and bad for society. Look no further than the MTA in NYC.
Terrible cost overruns and bad governance of the subway system, for what? So employees can clock extra hours and get egregiously overpaid? No thanks.
Competitive markets produce societally best outcomes, as is proven time and time again throughout history. Competition applies to labor too, by the way
Yes, which is why unions are great.
Corporations bargain collectively by default; each is a large unit, with a lot of resources, composed of many people.
Unions allow individuals to bargain collectively, to match corporations in terms of leverage, because few individuals are valuable enough to even come close.
Only with unskilled labor.
My profession is skilled and the skillset is in demand and hard to find. I bargain for myself, thanks.
I have repeatedly and at length discussed on HN about my 3 separate union membership experiences and how I will never again repeat them.
Bargaining collectively = monopoly. They can raise wages up to the level of marginal profit of the employing company.
Just the same as a company that's a monopoly could raise prices up to marginal value of the good to the customer.
If the company can bypass the union to hire others, then it's not a monopoly. But if the union is influential enough this may not be possible.
Distorted wages for labor is not good for broader society, only those being paid beyond their individual market power. Raises cost of goods and lowers quality for the rest
Edit: also, there’s a history of multiple private subway companies in NYC, it didn’t work out.
1. https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2021/01/how-the-mta-...
Given the lack of a profit motive, a well run government needs incentive structures to motivate results towards societally good outcomes. Too bad none of the local, state, federal governments do. Would be easy to institute if the will were there though
Edit: To address your edit, the private subway systems failed after NY instituted a price cap on fares, IIRC. And inflation destroyed their profitability over time due to this.
Once the subway system was made public, development pretty much halted entirely, outside of an extension every few decades.
Subway systems are private in Japan
But it goes off the rails when there’s a big difference in productivity between employees, and it gets even worse when managers are allowed to unionize and use strict labor laws to protect them while they play corporate politics.
Source: I’m Swedish and have seen it myself from most angles.
Define "societally best outcomes". By using the word "societally", you are saying it's not he best outcome for the business, nor is it the best outcome for the employees, nor the best outcome for the customers, but the best outcome for the society at large. Your MTA example shows that a union is great for workers. Please explain.
Considering unions are used successfully in many industries and are supported by both major parties in the US, you'll have a difficult time explaining how they are all wrong.
> Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective,
Isn't this the KickStarter union?
Also, what's a "Smaller and wide union"?
Finally, if unions are so bad, why do many of the largest companies in the world continue to hire from unions?
Because it's illegal not to. I dunno if you know this but if you have a union shop, the company can't just hire non-union employees. (In most cases) Once your company unionizes you can hire union employees, or go out of business.
Realistically what companies do is incorporate a subsidiary in a non-union jurisdiction and outsource the jobs to the subsidiary.
You can't assess these things in isolation.
If the Foxconn factory unionized, you can bet iPhones would cost hundreds of dollars more. Who bears that cost?
Consumers of iPhone/society at large (when extrapolating to other businesses)
I personally think current market rates for contractors, esp the staff Aug kind, are still lower than they should be, all things considered
I feel like this happens, from time to time, in virtually every company or institution. I know of people who work for public-sector unions and this kind of thing is commonplace there as well.
Badly run companies will get weak talent and become uncompetitive.
(It’s like $20k per year, and you’ll pay taxes on that when the day comes. You may have to move to Sweden to survive on it.)
We're making six figures here. Want more pay? Sit on your butt and do leetcode or practice interviews and network with other rich programmers. Move to a tropical island and work remote. Heck, you don't even need to go to college and just about anything you want to learn is a $9.99 class away or free on in video format.
Not every worker can or wants to work for a FAANG, whether because of skill, time available to study, logistics like location, moral reasons, or anything else. We all deserve good working conditions now and in the future.
Tech workers are absolutely spoiled compared to most other laborers. We also have higher leverage and thus a better chance at unionization compared to many others. Others having it worse should not prevent us from raising our own conditions, and actually helps improve conditions of other classes of laborers by making it more likely they'll unionize themselves or causing employers to improve conditions as a preventative measure.
When I want 'better', I work for it and get it myself, not by schmoozing the union bosses to get on their good side or paying union fees for 20 years to build up tenure.
Do you feel like you already make a lot of money, and you don't need more? If so, there are two actions you could take. You tell me which results in greater good in the world:
1. Don't push or struggle for better pay. Be happy with what you have, and let upper management and stockholder dividends soak up the extra. I'm sure they'll spend it making the world a better place.
2. Organize, push, and struggle to improve your pay. Since you're already happy with the pay level you get, donate all surplus to the charity of your choice. Put your niece through college. Save some of it, then retire earlier and spend more time with your family.
Turns out there are other countries outside of the US. And even in US not all developers are overpaid.
Moreover, software developers are much much more likely to drop out of their career before pension and/or face burnout than other fields.
According to Wikipedia:
Net income: $1.3 million after tax (2019)[1]: 1
If you hate where you work this much, improve yourself and work somewhere else.
Replacing at-will with "just cause", progressive disciplining, with criteria for performance improvement plans.
Adults don't give feedback in a transparent way and this is because they don't want to look discriminatory. Modern employment and HR policies have done great things, but they've made the waters for this kind of communication even more opaque and pushed incentives that way as well.
Being unable to effectively communicate in a competitive professional environment as an adult and unionizing to solve this problem is at best juvenile, even worse when you think about long-tail consequences in terms of babying future hires.
As someone who previously worked at Amazon and found it shitty, Amazon is a stupid point of comparison for unionizing in tech because it's a shit-show run like a hedge fund. However, as a heuristic, people who've spent more than two years at any kind of Amazon should be avoided IMO.
I would switch if I thought other places wouldn't lie. But it seems to me that all companies do.
You wouldn't buy a house or a new car without a contract. It seems stupid to me to enter a job without a real contract (as opposed the the ones we see now that are basically "we the company make the rules and can change them with or without notice anytime").
Organizing means you want more power, more control.
Also, there are many dimensions to liking or disliking your workplace. You may love the product your working on. You may really like your colleagues. You may also love the office environment. However, you may dislike the amount of vacation days, the lack of ability to work part time or the lack of paternal leave.
Workplaces have literally hundreds of properties, each of which you may like or dislike. So organizing to tweak those you dislike (while, on balance, you actually still like most properties) is very normal.
Admittedly, I was able to work on some very cool shit at Amazon - however the job made me hate my life.
Ergo - adult logical cycles were spent, decided to get a new job after leetcoding for a bit.
The people who aren't skilled enough to get new jobs or improve themselves (also holds true in any industry) will always be some degree of fucked. I admit, some unions are good, but engaging in a system that grants most benefit to people not willing to improve or make the bar of performance set by the industry isn't good for anyone involved. That said, never work for a place that makes you hate your life. And yes... having the ability to make that choice is a privilege.
What is this a reference to? Do you think at-will employment has something to do with woke language or am I reading this wrong?
Perhaps it might be different in tech, where software engineers are usually already very well paid. Hard to say.
Objective criteria for PIPs has nothing to do with niceness. Are you aware that this is a standard part of union contracts in general... like one of the first things usually negotiated?
> Adults don't give feedback in a transparent way and this is because they don't want to look discriminatory. Modern employment and HR policies have done great things, but they've made the waters for this kind of communication even more opaque and pushed incentives that way as well.
If I'm understanding your comment correctly, you're against opaque communications? Then, establishing these criteria in a contract is as transparent as you can get.
Unions are weak because the deck was stacked, the same way it is in every kleptocracy.
In many industries it's a requirement of the bargaining agreement. But many states have passed 'right to work' laws which state you can't be forced.
And still, I know of positions where there are 'union' and 'non-union' people basically doing the same job at companies. Non-union usually comes with a pay bump to offset not having the union benefits.
Humanity is endlessly capable of finding ways to do anything (good and bad).
Unions and employers negotiate what kind of decisions are made and how, but they're hardly inclusive of every last thing.
Some of the worst employer's I've had were union shops. It's entirely possible to have the opposite experience too, but there's nothing about a union that prevents toxicity.
For the record I've zero experience with how Kickstarter is / this isn't a comment about how or if there are issues at Kickstarter with such things.
I think they changed CEO recently, no? It seems like the ex-CEO, one of the founder, wasn't "a good cultural fit" after all. They had a round of layoffs a few years ago where some activist employees were weeded out, seems like it didn't work.
They fired 2 activists who were poor performers but not even the people leading the activism. The press made an enormous, outsized fuss over it. A bunch of non-activists left the company half out of disgust and half out of strong encouragement from their peers.
The company's culture is "very toxic" because 80% of the people there are moralizing to all of their peers instead of doing work.
Just kidding, I think unions are pure evil, and the above is not even the worst one of the many reasons.
- Minimum 3% annual CoL raises
- Profit-sharing bonuses
- Putting their current benefits in the contract, so management will have to re-negotiate if they want to make them worse.
- Replacing at-will with "just cause", progressive disciplining, with criteria for performance improvement plans.
Looking forward to more details & seeing how this plays out, especially as the market collapses (probably will end up looking like amazing timing on their part, btw).
Interestingly, for the people that like to paint unions as wokies, the progressive discipline item (if implemented well) actually _curbs_ 'cancel culture'. Because at-will employment is basically the enforcement mechanism for cancel culture.
Weird that they call it a CoL raise. If it isn't tied to cost, it is just an minimum annual raise.
What does "progressive disciplining" mean? I like the idea of criteria for being pipped, though I wonder if Kickstarter had a pip culture like Amazon.
These sorts of policies don't generally mean that, for extreme circumstances, larger punishments can't be used, just that you can't start with a harsh punishment for a mild issue.
(reading solely from this wording, I don't work at Kickstarter and so don't know the details of the contract other than what's published above.)
This idea that unions MUST be antithetical to the company or performance is silly. We have counterexamples on TV almost every day. Further, the idea that job insecurity is the best way to motivate people to perform also seems silly.
If you read the highlights, they're just asking for documentation on termination and disciplining. Not at all unreasonable.
You can prove anything from a false premise.
If you're talking about keeping 'high performers' in sales, that's what commission is for.
If you're talking about keeping 'high performers' in engineering, ... well, do you even need high performers? Due to the nature of their business, there are no challenging technical feats to accomplish. You really just need solid engineers to push the product and maintain the infrastructure.
"high performers" aren't going to be satisfied by Kickstarter's compensation at first place thus won't apply there.
Also good luck arguing to your boss you are a "high performer" in a company that has "progressive performance evaluation", by what measure?
This is a none issue.
High performers in tech do not have a problem with the heirs who own a majority of their corporation's stock telling them what to do, but are allergic to the people alongside them doing the work and creating the wealth from having input.
Do you know how hard it is to already weed out underperformers in large tech companies? I wouldn't be surprised if half of Kickstarter's engineers pumped out fewer than 3 PRs a week. Only the underperformers will choose to stay in the long run.